The Internet provides access to a vast amount of information. A major challenge given the quantity of information is how to find and discover information to provide a user with the most relevant information for a particular circumstance. The most common tool for doing this today is a keyword based search query provided to a search engine. The search engine matches received keywords to one or more words or phrases in a search index to identify documents, web pages, or other content that is potentially relevant to the user's query. For example, if a user searches for “dinosaurs” then the search engine provides the user a list of search results that are links to web pages that contain that term.
User queries often contain one or more entities (e.g., a person, location, or organization name) identified by name or properties associated with the entity. For example, one query might search for “Barack Obama”, while another might search for “President of the United States”. Both of these queries are looking for information related to a specific entity. Users may also search for locations, such as restaurants, banks, shopping centers, and so forth. Entities may include any type of nameable thing whether it is a business, person, consumer good, service, and so forth.
Today, when users search for a named entity using a search engine, the search engine presents assorted results that may be about a mixture of different entities with the same or similar names. It is often useful to visually represent a given entity with an image associated with that entity. For example, if the user searches for “beagle dog”, it might be useful to display a picture of a beagle next to a group of or individual search results. This can give the user a quick visual clue as to whether the search results are related to the same entity that the user intended. However, there is no well-defined way today to access an image for any particular topic or entity. Search engines often provide an image search, but it is unclear what images will be returned from such a search and whether any particular image is appropriate as a representative image for a particular entity. There is currently no mechanism that returns a representative image in real time given a search query.